Lenticular Vision: A Case Study

Some years I ago I wrote about a concept developed in Tara McPherson’s book Reconstructing Dixie: lenticular vision. It is a metaphor derived from the visual arts, and she deploys it to articulate the way that from the 1950s onwards the white-supremacist cultural systems of the American South increasingly hid the extent to which they were built on the oppression of Black people.

In a world where the Civil Rights movement meant that the open depiction of racial hierarchies was becoming subject to critique, the White response was often the erasure of African Americans. This created a fiction that the remaining cultural patterns ‘just happened’ to be White, rather than having been built by violence, segregation, and the appropriation of labour.

I have been thinking about this again recently in the context of a specific song which I was asked to arrange: ‘Moses’ from Singin’ in the Rain. In the movie, it is a tap-dancing extravanganza that emerges out of the mockery of a fusty old acting teacher, and the social world it inhabits is entirely Caucasian.

I hadn’t watched the movie in years (and it’s one I’ve probably only seen once), so I had forgotten that scene when I started playing through the sheet music in anticipation of the arrangement commission. That play-through twanged my spidey-senses though, and the more I looked at the detail of the song, the more I had a hunch that it was built on racist tropes. Both lyrical and musical elements seemed to be pointing to the caricaturing of the title character as the kind of comically stupid stereotype that inhabited blackface minstrelsy.

Doing a bit of digging to see if anyone else had noticed this did not produce much. There is a little out there about the origin of the lyrics, but no commentary beyond their being a nonsense rhyme based on word-play. There is quite a lot written about the scene in the movie, but it is mostly either simply descriptive or contextualising it in the context of movie history and the performers’ careers. Apparently I was going to have to use my own brain to figure this out.

So I decided to enumerate the elements that I was reading as coded minstrelsy references. As with any such connotative endeavour, one can’t point at any single one of them as ‘proof’ of racist intent, but when you get a cluster of them working together, you start to see a pattern.

Lyrics

• Moses is a name characteristically associated with African Americans. The story of Moses leading his people out of captivity was an important narrative for African Americans in the years of the underground railroad, featuring prominently in the corpus of spirituals, and the given name is found more commonly among Black people than Caucasians. (It is also of course a popular given name for Jewish people, but the song doesn’t have any other characteristic markers of Jewish stereotypes to take us in that direction.)
• The song’s lyric uses the kind of dialect that minstrelsy songs used to stereotype Black characters as simple or uneducated: e.g. toeses, knowses, the abbreviation Mose, hooptie doodie doodle. Indeed, it not only uses the dialect, but is predicated upon it; you couldn’t bowdlerise the dialect out in an attempt to rehabilitate it.
• The nonsense rhyme the lyrics are based on appeared in the 1880s-1890s, at a time when the stereotypes of blackface minstrelsy were particularly popular, especially in northern and Midwestern areas. Notably, the sources cited in the Wikipedia article that indicate place of origin come from these parts of the US: Minnetonka, MN; Hutchinson, KN, New York.

Music

• A number of elements recall the cakewalk and ragtime genres: tempo, metre, harmonic language, the syncopated primary motif, the cadential melodic figures. This isn’t simply the indexing of Black musical genres, but specifically of Black musical genres that have been appropriated to ridicule African-Americans.
• The call-and-response gesture of the bridge recalls wider African-American idioms, and the call figure itself recalls spirituals.
• The orchestration in the film mostly takes the song into the world of big band swing, in the way that the music industry repackaged jazz for a White audience in the mid C20th, but the episode around 2 ½ minutes into the sequence makes references back to a less tamed, New Orleans style of jazz, and include trombone slides to code this as blackface (clumsy, comedic).

Presentation

• the face-pulling sequence at the beginning of the song in the film echoes the grimaces and facial distortions that were central to minstrelsy stereotypes.

Of course, the re-contextualisation of the rhyme into mocking a stuffy White authority figure, along with the big band and tap-dance extravaganza in the film, distracts from these thumbprints, and allow them to be presented with plausible deniability: Oh no that’s not what we meant, we’re just have a fun time with lively music and dance. But they’re still there, and there are enough of them to lead one to believe that neither the musicians nor the designers of the visual sequence could have been entirely unaware of the implications.

Although, actually one doesn’t need to impute intentionality for the damage to be done. All those late-20th-century barbershoppers who used to cheerfully sing Dixie songs without the faintest idea of the systems of oppression they were based on still carried those messages across the stage, to be picked up by more culturally-aware people who quite reasonably concluded that the barbersphere was not at that time a place where Black people would feel comfortable. (And I would hope that moving on from that repertoire is not the only way in which the culture has become more inclusive in the interim.)

Anyway, the practical upshot of this is that I have declined to arrange this tune.